While surfing around and avoiding doing my chores today, I found this:

"And why would I be so insistent that you eat butter? Take a look at the long list of the benefits you receive when you include it in your diet:

1. Butter is rich in the most easily absorbable form of Vitamin A necessary for thyroid and adrenal health.
   
2. Contains lauric acid, important in treating fungal infections and candida.
   
3. Contains lecithin, essential for cholesterol metabolism.
   
4. Contains anti-oxidants that protect against free radical damage.
   
5. Has anti-oxidants that protect against weakening arteries.
   
6. Is a great source of Vitamins E and K.
   
7. Is a very rich source of the vital mineral selenium.
   
8. Saturated fats in butter have strong anti-tumor and anti-cancer properties.
   
9. Butter contains conjugated linoleic acid, which is a potent anti-cancer agent, muscle builder, and immunity booster
   
10. Vitamin D found in butter is essential to absorption of calcium.
    
11. Protects against tooth decay.
    
12. Is your only source of an anti-stiffness factor, which protects against calcification of the joints.
    
13. Anti-stiffness factor in butter also prevents hardening of the arteries, cataracts, and calcification of the pineal gland.
    
14. Is a source of Activator X, which helps your body absorb minerals.
    
15. Is a source of iodine in highly absorbable form.
    
16. May promote fertility in women.
17. Is a source of quick energy, and is not stored in our bodies adipose tissue.
    
18. Cholesterol found in butterfat is essential to children's brain and nervous system development.
    
19. Contains Arachidonic Acid (AA) which plays a role in brain function and is a vital component of cell membranes.
    
20. Protects against gastrointestinal infections in the very young or the elderly."

Information Acquired from: http://www.bodyecology.com/07/07/05/benefits_of_real_butter.php

There is quite a bit more information on the website. However, I know nothing of their diet or products and am not endorsing them in any way. The information was just cool.

For over a month now, sour cream has been created in our household with heavy cream, half and half, and vinegar. This was mainly due to me not being able to locate cultured buttermilk. But ah-ha! it was found late today at Cash and Carry tucked in with the rest of the buttermilk. Those sneaky stockers have been hiding it from me all along!

What is the significance of cultured buttermilk you might ask? Oh, let me tell you! Cultured buttermilk is currently something I'm very excited about! Most buttermilk purchased here in the States has been pasteurized or even ultra pasteurized. Though I am in great debt to old Pastuer there are just somethings that work, and culturing enzymes are one of those. The culture which is spoken of in buttermilk are pro-biotic bacteria which feed off the lactose (milk sugar) turning it into lactic acid. This ferments the milk and causes the milk proteins to thicken. This lactic acid gives buttermilk the incredible added quality of naturally fending off and inhibiting pathogenic bacteria. Yay good bacteria (probiotic); Boo bad bacteria (pathogenic).

This is all well and good, you might be thinking, but why is it important to your life? Using cultured buttermilk, you can add this bacteria into milk or cream and produce a "soured" product. (Don't confuse "soured" with spoiled because it is actually better for your body this way due to the lactose being broken down.) Thus sour cream! Way back when, this is how sour cream was created.

Enter the relevance to your current life: sour cream is no longer created this way. In 1973 the FDA repealed a law which wouldn't allow for imitation products to be placed into our food without appropriate labeling. This meant that anything could be substituted as long as the supposed nutritional content was not altered. Honestly, this was an attempt to reduce fat and lower costs. But, the result has become additives that are now added to milk in order to thicken it instead of probiotic bacteria. Things like hydrogenated oils, carageenan, guar gum, etc are now supplimented giving the sour cream a longer preservative time and a thicker texture for far, far cheaper than cultured product. Also, cultured product can wear out. The bacteria die. This doesn't taint the milk, but it means that the thickening characteristics of the culture are no longer present. That is highly costly on a commercial scale. Guar gum can hold up for quite some time along with carageenan and hydrogenated oil.

Information acquired from In Defense of Food:
An Eaters Manifestoby Micheal Pollen

The problem here is that these additives chemically alter our bodies ability to digest food. Though all are natural products, so is arsenic. Just because something comes from a plant does not mean it is a helpful component to add to your body. Secondly, I'm sure that very, very small does of these products (just like the aspertain which is in NutraSweet) aren't harmful. The problem has become that they are now in EVERYTHING! We are eating far more than we even realize.

So what exactly is the problem? Well hydrogenated oils are transfats. They have been linked to excessive free radicals, which are believed to be cancer causing agents. Carageenan is derived from red algea via alkali and has been shown to coat the inside of the stomach. This dramatically inhibits digestion causing the foods which venture to your intestine to not be properly broken down. Since most of the nutrient absorption from your body occurs in the intestine, when food isn't broken down, you cannot digest the nutrients. Carageenan is such a powerful coating agent it is what airlines use to de-ice the plane's wings. Guar Gum comes from the Guar plant and is basically a ground up grain, much like wheat. Do not be fooled however, Guar Gum is such an effective thickener that when combined with water it can swell in size 20 fold. This swelling is produced by a chemical action in reaction to the water and has been shown to dramatically reduce the ability of the intestines to process cholesterol and triglycerides. Not only that, but it slows glucose absorption as well. In laymans terms, your body consumes more cholesterol, more sugar (glucose), and more fat (triglycerides) because the intestines are processing it so much slower our body can't register that we have had enough. It doesn't block the absorption, it just slows it way, way down. This means the "full" reflex in our body can't kick in when it should because our intestines are still working so hard to break down the nutrients.

I don't know about you, but I would much rather have foods which help aide the digestion and absorption of nutrients into my body, rather than disrupt them. So, sour cream is being created now on top of our refrigerator. The hardest part of this process is leaving it alone. In fact, it doesn't require any work from you what so ever after combining the ingredients together.

Ingredients
1/4 cup of cultured buttermilk
1 cups of heavy cream

Directions
Pour the heavy cream into a mason jar, bowl, eating receptical. Add the cultured buttermilk (regular buttermilk will not work, only cultured). Stir to combine. Now cover it and leave it alone. Don't stir it any more or it will kill the culturing and you will have runny sour cream. Leave it out at room temperature 12-24 hours (basically overnight) or until it gets desirablly thick. Once it is thick enough, you can stir it all you want. Just put it in the fridge (this stops the culturing and thickening) and it will keep for about a week and a half.

If you can't find cultured buttermilk, you can always add plain white vinegar. The only difference in the final product is a slightly vinegary taste and no probiotic bacteria. You can also use Half and Half, Whole milk, 2 percent milk, or any combination there of. Just remember that it is the fat in the milk which makes it thicken. No fat, runny sour cream. Jules like his sour cream to stick to the spoon and make a Shloop sound when it is removed from the container. The only thing more important than the shloop is the loud Pluh sound it makes when it is splatted onto your plate. For this reason, the first couple of batches of sour cream I made were too runny for approval. They tasted great, but no shloop.

When I started reading In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Micheal Pollen points out that our brain is about 60 percent fat; every neuron is protectively sheathed in it; our cell membranes are constructed of fat and require the correct ratio for everything from hormones and glucose to toxins to permeate the walls; vitamins A and E require fat to be absorbed by our intestines; and essentially fat is a necessary part of our bodies ability to function. Somewhere in the obesity epidemic and scientifically modifying food we have forgotten this little fact. When I remembered it, I promptly could careless about how much fat was in our sour cream and the shloop was achieved.
Update: When you put the sour cream in the fridge, it will firm up a bit for those out there who are concerned with their final product. If you don't stir it up, and just eat it off the top, it will stay fairly thick as well. Secondly, the next time you need to make sour cream, use a 1/4 cup of your previous batch and it will turn out even better! This only works if the previous batch still has live culture in it. All that means is you need to use it within about 10 days. However, the awesomeness here is that you can keep creating miraculously FABULOUS sour cream without having to re-purchase the cultured buttermilk! Personally, I find this rather cool. I know....I'm a nerd.

Footnotes:
Carageenan

Filament Disassembly and Loss of Mammary Myoepithelial Cells after Exposure to Carrageenan,
Joanne Tobacman, Cancer Research, 57, 2823-2826, July 15, 1997

Carrageenan-Induced Inclusions in Mammary Mycoepithelial Cells, Joanne Tobacman, MD,
and Katherine Walters, BS, Cancer Detection and Prevention, 25(6): 520-526 (2001)

Consumption of Carrageenan and Other Water-soluble Polymers Used as Food Additives
and Incidence of Mammary Carcinoma, J. K. Tobacman, R. B. Wallace, M. B.
Zimmerman, Medical Hypothesis (2001), 56(5), 589-598

Structural Studies on Carrageenan Derived Oligisaccharides, Guangli Yu, Huashi Guan,
Alexandra Ioanviciu, Sulthan Sikkander, Charuwan Thanawiroon, Joanne Tobacman, Toshihiko
Toida, Robert Linhardt, Carbohydrate Research, 337 (2002) 433-440

Guar Gum

GuarNT Product Information, Tic Gums web-site (http://www.ticgums.com/), April 13, 2005.

Okazaki H et al, Increased incidence rate of colorectal tumors due to the intake of a soluble dietary
fiber in  rat chemical carcinogenesis can be suppressed by substituting partially an insoluble
dietary  fiber for the soluble one., Int J Cancer. 2002 Aug 1;100(4):388-94.

Melnick RL et al, Chronic effects of agar, guar gum, gum arabic,  locust-bean gum, or tara gum
in F344 rats and B6C3F1 mice,  Food Chem Toxicol. 1983  Jun;21(3):305-11.

Trans fats come from vegetable oil which has been hydrogenated, converting unsaturated fatty acids to saturated ones. In processed foods, trans fats replaced solid fats (like butter and vegetable oil) because they are cheaper and preserve foods better. Trans fats however, have unwanted side effects when consumed. They lower the "good" cholesterol and increase the "bad". This switch causes insulin resistance elevating the risk of Type 2 diabetes and contributes to coronary heart disease. In 1999 Harvard researchers estimated that 100,000 deaths annually could be prevented by reducing the consumption of trans-fats. So where are these harmful food additives? All over everywhere! The top offenders are boxed mixes such as cake and brownie mixes, Bisquick, cornbread mix; spreads like shortening, margarine, and butter substitutes; and powdered soup mixes.

The FDA required trans fats to be put onto food labels in January 2006, but a food can be labeled zero trans fats if it contains less than .5 grams of trans fat per serving. So be careful, because this labeling can be deceiving. By eliminating problem products our family has eliminated many of the harmful trans fats from our diet.

When we first started converting our food, we used margarine and Jiffy cornbread mix. They were cheap, good, and worked well. I am now finding out, however, that cheaper isn't always better. So we are now switching over to making our own butter and rendering buttermilk.

Finding diary products cheap enough to be able to justify the switch caused a bit of a problem. However, if you combine the price of buttermilk and the price of a pound of butter, you probably will break about even. In our household buttermilk is a complete frivolity, so breaking even here just wouldn't do. It took some sleuthing, but by using Cash & Carry (a restaurant supply company which allows the public) we were able to purchase whipping cream from a local, farmer owned dairy for less than it would cost to purchase a pound of butter. Not only that, but we can render the buttermilk as well which saved us even more! Score!

Homemade butter is about the simplest thing possible to make. Everyone thinks of a farm lady from the early 1900's with her churn struggling away, but all I used was my mixer. I will say, though, without a mixer, you are gonna need one hell of a bicep! Butter is basically whipping cream which has been over whipped. Due to only being able to purchase ultra-pasturized whipping cream, the process took about 30 minutes total. Here is the run down:

Pour the whipping cream into a bowl and begin to whip it. I used the whisk attachment, and medium speed. After about 15 minutes I had whipped cream.


Depending on your mixer, you may want to let it rest in between the transitions. I stopped and scrapped down the sides before mixing again for10 minutes till the whipped cream started to turn yellow and tasted like butter.

At this point I draped a towel over the top and turned the mixer onto turbo crazy high. After another 10 minutes on uber-high the butter began to break away creating a yellow, clumpy, dripping mixture.

I scrapped down the sides again and began mixing on high once more. At this point it is almost butter so you really need to watch it. In three minutes, the sloshing of the buttermilk could be heard and there was butter!Now, it is hard to accurately quantify how excited I was at this. Alright, I admit it.

I'm a nerd.
Being a nerd, I was also excited to have discovered the awesomest kitchen tool. When I am making butter, I call it my butter squisher (it has other names when I am doing other things with it). In reality I think it is supposed to be used with spaghetti some how, but around here it is a butter squisher, canning strainer, chicken stock divider, and lots of other great stuff.

By making butter, you are essentially separating the fats (the butter) from the liquid (the buttermilk) within the cream from the cow/goat/sheep/other dairy animal. So when it becomes butter, you have the clumpy yellow butter in the bowl sitting in the buttermilk. You need to squish as much buttermilk as you can out of the butter. Enter the butter squisher!

Press the butter to the side of the mixing bowl, clumping it all together into a mass and squeezing out the buttermilk as much as possible.














Once the butter is together in a mass, lift it out of the bowl, wrap the butter in a couple layers of paper towel and physically squeeze it as much as you can with your hands to remove any other excess buttermilk. This not only presses the butter into a ball, but gets a lot of the left over moisture out.
Pour the buttermilk out of the mixing bowl into a jar, bowl, or some other receptacle for later use. (It is amazing in mashed potatoes, pancakes, waffles, biscuits, gravy, muffins, just about anything other than drink. Remember, it is also pasteurized as long as the original whipping cream was pasteurized so no worries there.) You should get about a pint. Every quart of cream is different so it goes up and down a bit, but average of a pint.

Now place the butter ball back into the mixer, and switch attachments to the bread hook. Add a small amount of cold water (about 8 ounces) and beat the butter around again to chop it all up. Essentially you are rinsing all of the last of the buttermilk out.


After a minute of so (when the water looks as though it isn't getting any murkier) smush the butter together into a ball with your hands, wrap it in a couple of layers of paper towel, and squeeze all the water out. You now have butter! One quart of whipping cream yields about a pint of buttermilk and a pint of butter (about a pound). Both last as long as the store varieties when kept in the refrigerator.
The creating of our own dairy products is a new beginning in our household and a definite sign that we aren't turning back from our voluntary simplicity. In fact, as we venture further, the transition back seems even crazier than moving forward.

High Fructose corn syrup is in just about everything these days! One of the major benefits from starting to make our own snacks is the removal of this product from our daily consumption. As much as I knew that high fructose corn syrup probably wasn't the greatest thing for us to be eating, the effects of this product were virtually unknown to me until I began looking for ways to make our snacks at home.

When we first started removing packaged products, granola bars were one of the first to go. They were an easy product to just stop buying without impacting the daily goings on of our household. Both Jules and the Spicy Barracuda love a quick snack and the accessibility of granola bars so I had to find an equivalent substitute.

What is one of the main ingredients in most all store bought granola bars? High Fructose Corn Syrup. It just plain tastes good! However, high fructose corn syrup makes up nearly half of the sweeteners used in processed foods and is found in everything from sodas and fruit juice to crackers and cereal. Due to being six times sweeter than cane sugar and made from highly subsidized corn, high fructose corn syrup is significantly cheaper for commercial companies to use.

The catch is our body does not process high fructose corn syrup in the same way as sugar. Fructose is processed in our liver, and once there it triggers the liver's release of fat cells, called triglycerides. High triglycerides put us at higher risk for heart disease, stroke, and for putting on - and keeping on - weight. Scientists have also shown that the sweetener doesn't send the same "I'm full" message to the brain as happens when we consume sugar. This adds to the amount of unnecessary sugary snacks we consume.
Statistics and Information acquired from Grub:
Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen by Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry

Honestly, the first batch of granola bars were a bit of a disaster. They were uber crunchy, rock hard, crumbly things that the Barracuda diligently ate. He exclaimed their greatness as he does most anything Mommy makes (except broccoli slaw) in sentimental loyalty, but I knew the truth. Jules is not quite as humoring as the Barracuda and wouldn't go near them at all! A revision was necessary and quick!

After much internet research and dozens of recipes, I began to look much more at what they were doing, rather than what they were made out of. I know the ingredients our family likes, it was how to combine them so that the granola bars wouldn't be incredibly crunchy and would still stick together. It appeared to be a very simple ratio of sweet chewy goo to dry ingredients. Another attempt and the results were significantly different. Jules loves them now and the Barracuda has a hard time deciding between granola bars and his favorite breakfast of apple cinnamon oatmeal.

The dry ingredients don't matter. It is completely up to the tastes of your particular family. We like oatmeal, rice krispies, peanuts, dried fruit, sunflower seeds, and rough chopped mixed nuts. Other great add ins are wheat germ, flax seeds, coconut, and pumpkin seeds. This is a great way to get rid of odds and ends left in your pantry! The most helpful thing I have found is bulk trail mixes which come in tons of different varieties. You can find them with chocolate pieces or beloved M&M's, fruit and nut bits (our favorite so far) , salty pretzel combinations, and all sorts of stuff. They usually have a wide range and balanced variety of tasty snackworthy ingredients. These are wonderful when it comes to the flavored part of the granola because you don't need much of each ingredient just a balance of lots of little stuff. The trail mix also helps with variety if your family winds up loving this recipe as much as mine. We usually get about 3 cups of the trail mix and that will last for 3 batches of granola bars. The cost varies depending on which mix you get, but normally it is between 2-5 dollars a pound.

As much as possible, I get the mixed nuts/peanuts/oatmeal without roasting, oil, or salt. It isn't necessary for this recipe because the ingredients are covered in sticky sweet goo which overpowers everything else. If you are totally a salt fiend go ahead, but my guys don't miss it.

The ratio I've found to work is 7 1/2 cups dry ingredients to 2 1/2 sticky goo. These are approximates; it really won't matter if they aren't exact.

Granola Bars
Dry Ingredients
3 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 cups rice krispies
1 cup peanuts
1 cup steel cut oatmeal
1 cup trail mix
2 Tblspns Cinnamon

Delicious Sweet Goo Ingredients
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
1 stick butter
1/2 cup peanut butter

The honey and peanut butter can be the super cheap stuff. The flavor isn't impaired at all and it is significantly more cost effective. They are designed to bind the bars together, but allow enough oil for them to not become a granola brick.

Thoroughly mix your dry ingredients together in a gynormous bowl and set aside. (A clear Pyrex bowl works wonders because you can see through on all sides.) On low to medium heat combine brown sugar, honey, butter, and peanut butter in a sauce pan. Stirring with a wooden spoon I found worked the best, though a whisk would work too if you don't mind creating more dishes to clean. Make sure the heat is high enough for the ingredients to begin to melt together, but not so high it scorches them. You are basically trying to combine all of these ingredients together to become a very sticky caramel-like substance.

When the gooey stuff is well melted and combined (about 5 minutes) and beginning to bubble slightly, remove from heat and dump into the bowl of dry ingredients using the wooden spoon to scrape as much from the pan as possible. Immediately put dish soap and water into the sauce pan to soak. (The first time I made the mistake of allowing the goo to dry in the pan....It wasn't pretty or easy to remove. Lots of soaking, lots of scrubbing.) Mix the dry ingredients and goo together really well, making sure there aren't any pockets where the dry ingredients are hiding. This is why the clear bowl is so helpful.

Line an 11 x 13 pan with parchment paper, leaving a small amount of overlap so you can pull up on the parchment to remove the granola bars. Be sure to also grease the parchment; they are virtually impossible to get out without this! Firmly press the granola goo mixture it into the pan. I used large ziplog bags as gloves to smash the granola goo as tightly as possible into the bottom and corners of the pan. Let the pan sit for 4-6 hours or until the granola has completely cooled! I usually come back to them a couple of times to smush them down firmly again. The smushing is how they stay together, but are still chewy. When they are totally cooled, pull up on the parchment to remove the granola bars in one large granola brick.

Press down firmly with a knife to cut the brick into bars. Don't saw! They will fall apart. I put all the bars into a large ziplock and place them in the pantry. Some people wrap them individually in plastic wrap to grab and go snack.

This recipe makes one large ziploc full of granola bars, which is about how many we go through in two weeks. Sometimes, I make two pans at the same time so that I don't have to wait the 4-6 hours of cooling time twice. The heating and mixing doesn't take long at all (maybe 30 minutes?). They are a wonderful replacement for the store bought version of granola bars and I've noticed us start to eat them instead of cookies as well. You can increase or decrease the amount of sugary goo depending on how your family likes them, but I highly doubt they will miss the high fructose corn syrup!